Adriaan Verstijnen

Adriaan Verstijnen was always fascinated by both music, photography and technology. In 1973 he was invited by friend and famous young theatre performer Herman van Veen to set up an independent recording label called Harlekijn and to manage the company with the same name. AV invited both baroque specialist Ton Koopman and contemporary specialist Reinbert de Leeuw (both world famous in the Netherlands in their field) to make LP recordings and both artists made platinum awarded LPs produced by AV. In 1975 Teldec Germany offered Harlekijn a contract for the world distribution of their productions under the Teldec label (Das Alte Werk for the baroque recordings). A couple of years later Philips Classics took over this deal under the Philips brand.

In 1977 AV started engineering the Harlekijn recordings himself, at the time only for musicians working for the Harlekijn Label. In 1983 Erato France (a Warner label) offered a contract for Ton Koopman and his baroque recordings and in the same year AV was appointed as a professor in classical recording technique at the Tonmeister course of the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Since 1983 AV made hundreds of recordings for Dutch and international labels both with national and international artists, basically working as an independent recording engineer.

During his almost 35 year recording career AV recorded the complete J.S. Bach Cantatas (67 CDs) and the complete J.S. Bach organ works and in fact almost everything Bach composed, but also made at least a hundred CDs in the contemporary field by among others the Schoenberg Ensemble, the Schoenberg Quartet, the Nieuw Ensemble, the ASKO ensemble, the Arditti Quartet, and working with many composers like Mauricio Kagel and Louis Andriessen. AV also recorded for Sony Classical a couple of CDs with YoYo Ma.

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